


Hierarchy of Needs

by AnnelieseMichel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-11
Packaged: 2017-12-26 07:51:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnelieseMichel/pseuds/AnnelieseMichel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Food. Sleep. Health. Shelter. Castiel has come to truly understand these basic needs in the hazy weeks since discovering his own humanity.</p><p> </p><p>Based on Tumblr speculation of a second laundromat scene for Season 9.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hierarchy of Needs

Food. Sleep. Health. Shelter. Castiel has come to truly understand these basic needs in the hazy weeks since discovering his own humanity. It is a daily struggle, eking out this existence, scrabbling just to fulfill even these most simple of requirements.

In his first days, he learned so much. What it is to feel true, physical pain and the resolve it takes to push past that and treat an injury yourself. He learned how exhaustion drags a human down, shuts down systems one by one until your body holds you hostage, takes away your ability to ignore it.

He understands the deep ache of staying just on the edge of starvation, how the mere smell of food can flood you with desire and leave you doubled over in pain when it’s denied to you.

Shelter is perhaps the easiest thing to come by. He drifts from one idea to the next, falling in with others on this shared bottom rung of basic life, before being driven away by close quarters and to preserve their safety from the two armies who hunt him now.

In the end, he begins where he started his journey in humanity.

There are so many laundromats open 24 hours, and he waits and watches quietly until they empty out, trusting that small town facilities rarely mean late night laundering.

Castiel likes the familiarity of these places, just as he liked Biggersons for its sameness. They may be a Sudsy’s or a Grime Buster’s or a Kwick Klean (the spelling baffles him), but regardless of the name on the building they all smell the same; like fabric softener and warm fabric and detergent. It’s a clean smell, and it reminds him of the crisp sheets on the bed he’d been assigned to recover in at the bunker.

He misses that bed, now, and regrets having ever left it, regrets ignoring Dean’s simple directive to heal and not taking advantage of the space his friend had given him to do so in.

The chairs are uncomfortable, but if he wads his hoodie up he can use it as a pillow, and the residual heat of the machines keeps the space warm even without the extra layer. Curling up beneath the folding table at night takes him out from directly beneath the buzzing yellows lights and out of line of sight of the windows, and unlike the homeless shelters and park benches and under-bridge communities, he doesn’t have to worry about the police cruising by slowly, suspiciously. He doesn’t have to wonder when the next person will recognize him from a stained glass window or a news reel of a campaign office. He doesn’t have to fear his sins will cost lives other than his own.

Sometimes there are stray coins, rolled away beneath the machines that he can see from the floor, and he gathers them carefully and adds them to whatever he can scrabble on his trek. He likes Kit Kats from the vending machines, how conveniently they break apart to allow him to spread it out, to ration the food to himself, but he has been trying things as he can, looking for what will provide most sustenance.

He could likely break the machines and finally gorge himself, but it seems poor repayment for the unknowing shelter these places provide, and after everything he’s done petty theft seems a poor way to begin his penance. He survives on the things people abandon; lost coins, discarded leftovers in diner dumpsters, and forgotten clothing.

It’s the coffee that finally catches up with him, that brings Dean back to his doorstep. He had three quarters—not enough for anything significant from the vending machine ($1.35 for a bag of cheese crackers that he now knows from experience is deceptively large, and only half-filled), so he gives in to his first human addiction again instead. It chases away the exhaustion, warms him from within, and for a time makes him feel like he belongs among these people.

He slides the change across to the waitress at the local diner, knowing that after he finishes drinking from the chipped ceramic mug he will need to move on. They cannot keep the table for him, and he looks like (and is) another transient taking up space of more paying customers. He doesn’t begrudge them this.

He’s surprised when the waitress slides a few packages of soup crackers his way, their cheap plastic bags crinkling, and then deeply touched by the casual generosity of humanity. He makes them last as best he can, pressing his fingertips to the buttery crumbs on the plastic to ensure he doesn’t lose any of it, and finds himself talking to the waitress as he once did at Biggerson’s.

(He doesn’t want to imagine what happened to Kara, and all of those poor souls in New Mexico, happening to this woman.)

If he still believed in fate as anything but his Father’s cruelest joke on his children, he’d think it obvious that of course the first waitress he allows himself to truly converse with knows Dean Winchester and has encountered the supernatural enough to not attribute his otherness and his stories of humanity’s rise and their beliefs and their beauty and follies to simple psychosis.

She sends him out, once the management requires it, with a cheap styrofoam cup holding the dregs of the day’s soup and a pocket full of crackers, and once he is out of the door she strips her apron off, grabs her cell phone, and watches him make his way back to his temporary haven in the dark, cradling the soup like a precious gift. She makes a call.

It’s ironic. It’s from watching Dean that he knew how to engage in conversation at all, however awkwardly. And now this carefully observed and practiced skill is what has him waking up to Dean straight-arming the glass door open in the dead of the night, the sound sending Cas scrabbling to clear his table on the opposite side, prepared to fight or escape, crouched low as he determines which he will need.

"Cas?" Dean’s voice is vulnerable and querulous, and he takes a few steps farther in before halting between lines of dryers and washers. It is that hesitation which finally forces Castiel to accept what he is seeing, to believe his own eyes and put aside his surprise.

His shoulders sloop, his hands fall open at his sides, and he gives the familiar words as confirmation, his voice hoarse and raw and eyes stinging as he blinks back his first human tears. He can’t explain where they come from or why his body deems them necessary at this moment.

"Hello, Dean."

This time when Dean envelops Castiel in his arms, he understands something else about humanity. His fists bunch into Dean’s jacket, and he clings tight the way he hadn’t allowed himself in Purgatory, the last time Dean had recklessly and irrationally tried to save him from his own guilt.

Finally he understands why, along with food and shelter and health and sleep, the things humanity needs to survive, a final component is always listed as just as necessary, just as vital.

Love.

_I need you._


End file.
